Trigger Warnings: Sexual assault, torture, murder

Game Name: Eternal Victim

Creator: Dexter Morgenstern

Player 1: The Witness

Instruction Manual: Missing. Please work it out as you go along.

Level Bosses:
* Level 1 - The Whistler
* Level 2 - The Constrictor
* Level 3 - The Director
* Level 4 - The Father

PRESS START

The most important thing you need to know going into this novella is that you only know what the Witness knows, which in the beginning is very little indeed. This made for a serious amount of confusion on my part and significant helpings of “What the hell did I sign up for?!”

If this story is of interest to you please don’t give up when you get the feeling you’re hallucinating; when every time you think you know where you are the scene changes on you and you don’t know how you got there. Your patience and attempt to retain your sanity will be rewarded if you stick with it. Know that things will fall into place. I graduated from confusion to intrigue and then to fascination and compulsion. I had to know what was coming next and how it would all come together in the end.

Dexter Morgenstern writes at the start of the novella that he wants to write stories for games and as I read I could see this story translating into the gaming world quite easily. I viewed the story much like a game as I progressed and ultimately came to see the story as having four main levels, each with a level boss to face at the end. While there was a cyclical nature to what the player needs to accomplish within the level, each level takes place in a different time period and with different characters.

During each level the Witness gains information, mostly fairly cryptic at the time, which they hope will eventually help them make sense of who they are and what their connection is to the characters they encounter within the game. The characters that remain consistent throughout the levels (besides the Witness) are the girl in the mirror and the Preta, which is translated from Sanskrit as ‘hungry ghost’.

Because characters come and go you get to know their stories but I didn’t find I had the time to connect emotionally with them. Having said that, there’s so much action and running around that it’s not as though any of the characters have time to sit down and have a chat over a cuppa with you anyway. If it helps you to put all of this into context, Dexter describes it himself as a “chaotic trifecta of Buddhism, history, and ghost-zombies”. Intriguing, huh?!

Because I seem to be fairly immune to feeling fear while reading, I wasn’t scared reading Eternal Victim. I was unsettled by it though and for me, feeling unsettled over a period of time is more uncomfortable to sit with than scary moments that come and go. I haven’t been this unsettled by a book in a long time so I was suitably impressed by that.

If you’re squeamish and/or the trigger warnings apply to you then you may want to skip this book or at least approach it with caution. If you can handle graphic details of tortuous murders committed by deranged serial killer types you should be okay, but you’d be forgiven if you cringe at certain points as your already overactive imagination works overtime. If you can eat while watching a Saw movie you should be fine too.

This novella is certainly not going to be for everyone as it truly is one of the strangest books I’ve read, but it happily transformed for me from being close to ditching it for the first 10% to being glad I persevered fairly soon after. I’d like to reread Eternal Victim to see how the reading experience changes now that I know how it all fits together. I’m definitely interested in reading more books by this author.

Beware the fog!

GAME OVER

Credits: Thank you so much to NetGalley, Dexter Morgenstern and BookBuzz.net for the opportunity to read this novella.

A horror story following the mysterious ‘Witness’ as she trails through memories and dreams to learn the stories of the lives and last moments of victims of an endless evil. Can she break the cycle?

Eternal Victim is a surreal and chilling horror with some beautiful imagery and truly gruesome and horror-filled moments. I’d been looking for a good horror story for a long time and this certainly fulfilled that request.

The author mentions in his beginning notes that he draws inspiration from a lot of video games such as the Resident Evil series. This definitely shines through in the book but in some places I would actually preferred to have been playing it than reading! The plot tended to get a bit repetitive at times, perfect for a player in a game to get used to the rules and get to the ending but in a book it just felt a bit tiresome by the third time round. I also struggled a bit with the characters in the third and final section as well – I didn’t actually sympathise with any of them as I had in the earlier stories and was struggling to work out who was who.

I also found I didn’t quite understand the rules of the world in some places. Most of the time The Witness is in a ghost-like state and is unable to touch things and people would walk through her, then she’d ‘possess’ people and be able to interact with the outside world. However there were some places where she was still in ghost state but able to open doors and move things around. It just seemed a bit inconsistent but I guess the first words you read in the book are; ‘seriously, don’t take it seriously’ so perhaps I shouldn’t!

I don’t usually mentioning formatting in NetGalley reviews but this book is out for sale and I must say I found the chapters very confusing. Although it certainly helped with the dream-like aspect, most chapters start mid-sentence and the sequencing jumped around a lot with additional roman numeral numbering as well which was very confusing. I sort of felt like the book would have been better placed to just have the 3 ‘parts’ marked out and then the rest without chapters rather than just scattering them around without logic.

Overall Eternal Victim is a creepy horror with some great imagery and gory details but it’s a little too repetitive in places. Thank you to NetGalley and BookBuz for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Non stop terror filled moments circling and twisting
This was a nightmare that I couldn't wake from, one that slipped from one horror to the next, no rest, no time to rest, just the next shutter felt down deep in your soul. There was some really twisted, stuff in these pages, and I loved it. Many times in this book I cringed and found myself wanting to turn away but unable to do so. Read with all your lights on.